WARS ABROAD, WARS AT HOME
To Survive, the Democratic Party Needs to Stand Up to Wall Street and Global Corporations
If Democrats want to retake government, they will need to do more than be the party that isn’t as bad as Trump, starting with closing the wealth gap… For years, the Democratic Party chose to overlook these tough realities: Wages are low and stagnant. Jobs are outsourced. Drug prices and insurance premiums rise, and students take on a lifetime of debt just to have a shot at a decent job. Wall Street banks get bailed out when risky bets fail, and millions of ordinary Americans are punished with job losses and foreclosures for a financial crisis they didn’t cause. Meanwhile, virtually all the wealth generated by a recovering economy goes to the top 1 percent. The severe inequality that results from these lopsided policies fuels frustration and the nihilism that led to the election of Donald Trump. The Democratic Party has fallen short by not taking on the structural causes of this crisis: an economy that favors big corporations and global capitalism. The party also has failed to step up to the climate crisis, which requires a radically different sort of economic recovery, and to the crisis of racial exclusion. More
WILL KEITH ELLISON MOVE THE DEMOCRATS LEFT?
Ellison is co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the putative left-wing answer to the brinksmen of the Freedom Caucus on the right, and he was an early and fervent supporter of Sanders’s Presidential campaign. Like Sanders, he consistently opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade deal sought by the Obama White House in its final two years which was attacked by populists in both parties. (President Donald Trump recently withdrew the U.S. from the T.P.P.) Ellison announced his candidacy for the D.N.C. chairmanship six days after the Presidential election. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren, of Massachusetts, predictably endorsed him—but so did establishment figures, such as Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, and his predecessor, Harry Reid… Meanwhile, the turmoil of Trump’s first month as President has alternately panicked and emboldened the Democratic base. The activist surge on the left, most spectacularly demonstrated at the Women’s March, in Washington, D.C., and in other major cities, and during protests at nearly a dozen airports after the executive order to temporarily ban people from seven majority-Muslim countries, has stoked a conviction that the Party must be more forceful in combatting Trump. Democrats in the Senate have been conspicuously more strident in their opposition to his Cabinet nominees in the days since the airport protests. More
In Trump’s White House, It’s the Billionaires vs. the Bombardiers
How do we make sense of the apparent chaos in the Trump White House, with the president saying something one day and his top officials insisting otherwise the very next? There is, of course, the unstable personality of the president himself, and the fact that he has yet to install a complete cadre of senior policy-makers. But I believe there’s a deeper, more structural explanation for the chaos. Swirling around Trump and fighting
for supremacy are two powerful factions: the billionaires, who seek maximum opportunity for elite enrichment, and the bombardiers—political ideologues who seek to bring down the existing world order and establish a new one in their preferred image. So long as these two competing factions continue to enjoy Trump’s patronage, we can expect continuing reversals in the weeks and months to come… The bombardiers may share some illiberal values with the billionaire class, but they have a fundamentally different worldview. For them, economic enrichment is less important than prevailing in what they view as an epic struggle between the “Judeo-Christian West” and the non-Western (especially Islamic) world—a “clash of civilizations,” as the late political scientist Samuel Huntington put it. This group includes senior White House strategist Steve Bannon, senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, and immigration and security adviser Sebastian Gorka. For the bombardiers, capitalism has been corrupted by global elites who put multinationalism and free trade above national sovereignty and the struggle against Islam. More
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NEW WARS / OLD WARS – What Could Possibly Go Wrong
The Misuse of American Military Power and The Middle East in Chaos
The standard triumphalist version of the last 100 or so years of our history might go something like this: in the twentieth century, the United States repeatedly intervened, just in the nick of time, to save the feeble Old World from militarism, fascism, and then, in the Cold War, communism. It did indeed save the day in three global wars and might have lived happily ever after as the world’s “sole superpower” if not for the sudden emergence of a new menace. Seemingly out of nowhere, “Islamo-fascists” shattered American complacence with a sneak attack reminiscent of Pearl Harbor. Collectively the people asked: Why do they hate us? Of course, there was no time to really reflect, so the government simply got to work, taking the fight to our new “medieval” enemies on their own turf. It’s admittedly been a long, hard slog, but what choice did our leaders have? Better, after all, to fight them in Baghdad than Brooklyn. What if, however, this foundational narrative is not just flawed but little short of delusional? Alternative accounts lead to wholly divergent conclusions and are more likely to inform prudent policy in the Middle East. More
Poll: Majority Of Americans Are Worried About War
Thirty-six percent of Americans, according to the poll, would say they are “very worried” that the United States will become engaged in a major war in the next four years. Thirty percent were somewhat worried, 25 percent were not too worried, 8 percent were not at all worried and 2 percent had no answer… NBC News noted, in a write-up of poll results, some interesting splits in friendliness toward Russia: Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents were split on their stance (50 percent call it an ally/friendly, 49 percent say unfriendly/enemy) while their Democratic and Democratic-leaning counterparts thought overwhelmingly – 75 percent – that it was unfriendly/enemy. Finally, Americans are split on the military’s effectiveness in fighting terrorism: 47 percent of respondents said “using overwhelming military force is the best way to defeat terrorism.” Forty-nine percent said “relying too much on military force creates hatred that leads to more terrorism.” Four percent had no answer. More
SIGN PETITION SUPPORTING
'Stop Arming Terrorists Act' H.R. 608
United for Peace and Justice has joined with the U.S. Peace Council, Veterans for Peace and several other national peace organizations to initiate a public campaign in support of Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard’s (D-Hawaii) STOP ARMING TERRORISTS ACT (H.R. 608), which she originally introduced to the Congress on December 8, 2016.
H.R. 608 is a bipartisan bill, which has been co-sponsored by Rep. Barbara Lee (D-California), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vermont), Rep. Walter B. Jones (R-North Carolina), and Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida).
The Stop Arming Terrorists Act (H.R.6504) has only 5 co-sponsors, none from Massachusetts
The West’s Moral Hypocrisy on Yemen
Only a few months ago, interventionists were demanding a militant response by Washington to what George Soros branded “a humanitarian catastrophe of historic proportions” — the killing of “hundreds of people” by Russian and Syrian government bombing of rebel-held neighborhoods in the city of Aleppo. Leon Wieseltier, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and former New Republic editor, was denouncing the Obama administration as “a bystander to the greatest atrocity of our time,” asserting that its failure to “act against evil in Aleppo” was like tolerating “the evil in Auschwitz.” How strange, then, that so many of the same “humanitarian” voices have been so quiet of late about the continued killing of many more innocent people in Yemen, where tens of thousands of civilians have died and 12 million people face famine. More than a thousand children die each week from preventable diseases related to malnutrition and systematic attacks on the country’s food infrastructure by a Saudi-led military coalition, which aims to impose a regime friendly to Riyadh over the whole country. More
Russia and the West: A NEW COLD WAR?
Not since the days of Ronald Reagan has Russia played such a prominent role in US political life. After Donald Trump’s shock victory – greeted in the Russian parliament with cheers and champagne – came accusations of Russian meddling in the US electoral process, followed in January by the leak of a dossier claiming that the Russian authorities had accumulated (even more) compromising information on Trump. More recently there have been alarms over the Kremlin’s connections with and possible influence on the incoming secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, and Trump’s now ex-national security adviser, Michael Flynn. The rhetoric emanating from US politicians and media commentators too seems to be drawn from another era… All this makes it hard to shake the feeling that we are living through a deranged re-run of the Cold War. Of course, the idea of a reprise of the superpower stand-off that dominated the 20th century has been in the air more or less since the actual Cold War ended, the stuff of countless think-tank briefings and film plots. But it has gained particular force over the last decade or so, supplying a readymade framework for understanding the mounting tensions between Russia and the West. More
Why We Must Oppose the Kremlin-Baiting Against Trump
The bipartisan, nearly full-political-spectrum tsunami of factually unverified allegations that President Trump has been sedi-
tiously “compromised” by the Kremlin, with scarcely any nonpartisan pushback from influential political or media sources, is deeply alarming. Begun by the Clinton campaign in mid-2016, and exemplified now by New York Times columnists (who write of a “Trump-Putin regime” in Washington), strident MSNBC hosts, and unbalanced CNN commentators, the practice is growing into a latter-day McCarthyite hysteria. Such politically malignant practices should be deplored wherever they appear, whether on the part of conservatives, liberals, or progressives… The allegations are driven by political forces with various agendas: the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, which wants to maintain its grip on the party by insisting that she didn’t lose the election but that it was stolen by Russian President Vladimir Putin for Trump; by enemies of Trump’s proposed détente with Russia, who want to discredit both him and Putin; and by Republicans and Democrats stunned that Trump essentially ran and won without either party, thereby threatening the established two-party system. More
Donald Trump’s Remarks Signal He Could Start a New Nuclear Arms Race
Donald Trump’s declaration on Thursday that “if countries are going to have nukes, we’re going to be at the top of the pack,” flew in the face of decades of U.S. efforts to negotiate cautious, mutual reductions in nuclear arsenals around the world. Trump’s comments to Reuters essentially invited other nuclear powers to escalate their capabilities, and has the potential to set off a new nuclear arms race… The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which Congress ratified in 1970, requires the U.S. to pursue the “cessation” of a nuclear arms race between superpowers, and to take steps towards mutual disarmament. The whole idea was to end the nuclear arms race forever… “The US has certainly not ‘fallen behind on nuclear weapon capability,” wrote Hans Kristensen, a nuclear expert at the Federation of American Scientists, in an email to The Intercept. “It is already ‘at the top of the pack’ and has the most capable nuclear forces in the world backed up by overwhelming conventional forces.” More
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